Brother

 

My brother is dying, and he doesn’t want me to tell anyone. He didn’t even tell me until he was through with all his treatments, until they told him there was nothing more they could do and put him on hospice. Then he calls me to tell me he has a tumor in his liver and it is too large to remove. He has 6 months, he tells me. But that turned out to be an erroneous estimate. He made that call to me on the 22nd of March. It’s now, ^{April 16th}  and we are already at the end. 

Two days after this revelation, we drive up to see him. He has lost 50 pounds and almost all his hair, but the main thing is his color. He's jaundiced, sitting in his lounge chair, which he stayed in for most of our visit. He was still fully engaged, talking a lot, eating tangerines and drinking Cokes. We reminisced a little. My brother has a skewed memory of his childhood. Or maybe mine is skewed. I remember happy times and he does not. It has been the great divide between us for many years. His bitterness and anger have made it hard for me to be around him, and so, for the last 20 or so years, we haven’t seen each other much.

Before this visit, the last time we got together was about 18 months ago, when I was still working in the county job. A law seminar took me to Austin. They picked me up at my hotel and we had dinner at a catfish place. The old bitterness arose and tainted our time together, as it has done so many times before. But we have always talked on the phone a half dozen times a year, birthdays and Christmas, and other times, too. We usually end up talking about our pets. Nice, safe subjects--maybe some movies or television shows we’ve seen. I catch him up on family news I might have, which he never seems to care about much. Maybe he would make some flippant remarks about it all. But it wasn’t always this way. 

I don’t have any one particular early memory of my brother. He is five years older than me and he was just always there. He was my mentor, my protector, my Bubbie. He held my hand a lot. He guided me through the world, choosing the food we liked, the games we played, the movies we needed to see, and television shows we should watch. He was in many ways, the most important person in my life. My confidant. My cohort. I told him everything, and he did the same, although not always with such openness. If something terrible happened at school, a kid got shoved down on the playground or got licks from a teacher, I raced home to tell my brother all about it. His unremarkable responses instructed me that these things were part of life, and nothing to get excited over. Bad things sometimes happen, and that’s just the way it was.

Because of my brother I became an avid reader. Not because he sat me down with books and forced me to read. But because he put books in my way without realizing the effect they would have on me. We regularly took the bus downtown, usually to go to a movie, but the bus stop was right outside the library, which meant we spent a lot of time inside, waiting for the bus. We could see through the plate glass windows in the library when the bus arrived and raced out there in time to hop on it. My brother had important things he wanted to research, things that entailed microfilm and old magazines and newspapers, which meant I was free to roam the big three-story library at will, as long as we were back together in the lounge at such-and-such time to run for the bus. He gave me my orders and taught me how to read the big round clock beside the elevators.

The third floor was where the kid’s books were and I spent all my time up there, sitting at pint-sized tables with stacks of colorful books. I couldn’t wait to read them all, and usually got through one or two before I had to make the difficult decision about which three I would check out and take home. Three was the maximum back then. Eventually, our library started running a Book Mobile out to our part of town. My brother learned the schedule and where they would stop, and we walked hand-in-hand down our long block and over two short end blocks. I always wanted to run ahead as soon as I saw the bus-like vehicle, with “Book Mobile” emblazoned on its side. I can still remember the wonderful bready smell as I climbed the two stairs. It was like stepping into a book cave, absolutely magical to me. These were the wonders I would never have known without my brother to show them to me, and they defined me all my life.

There are so many other memories, so many things we did and told each other. We loved one another without question. I could have had a mean brother, one who didn’t like it that as the baby of the family and the only girl, I got special treatment at times. If he resented it he never showed that he did. His teen years were difficult, and I remember hurting for him. I remember taking his side against nagging parents. I remember missing him terribly the summer he spent in California with our aunt and her family. I missed him so much I slept in his empty bed the whole time he was gone. We used to sing for each other, and dance. We used to play like we were in movies and make up our own scripts. We were inventive children and we didn’t even realize it at the time. Sometimes it seemed like we were in our world together.

But time passes. Children grow up, get their own circle of friends, their own outside interests. It happens to all siblings. We no longer lived in the same town, sometimes not even the same state. We saw each other less and less, but for me those bright shining memories of our childhood continued to glow in the back of my mind. But as the years passed, he seemed to dwell on the wrongs that he felt were done to him by our parents. Not imagined wrongs, they were real enough but so long ago wrongs. He never could seem to turn that page, and it became more and more of a roadblock in our relationship.

And now he is about to die. My feelings are hyper-emotional and complicated, all mixed up with my childhood devotion and my adult resentments for the support he couldn’t give to me when I needed it. I love him dearly; maybe in the back of my mind I knew, since he was older, that he might go before me, but I never imagined it would be this soon. And once he is gone, I will truly be orphaned, with no one else in the world besides myself, who shares all my history from the beginning. Part of me cannot believe this, or fully accept it. I guess in a way, my brother was my first FIRST love. I will miss knowing I can’t pick up the phone and call him. That will seem odd, and awful. I miss him already.